The following piece contains spoilers for the Sally Rooney novel Beautiful World, Where Are You.
Exactly 69 pages into Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You—a book so highly anticipated that a mere mention of the galley at any Brooklyn-based gathering this summer reliably turned heads—arrives my favorite scene, where 29-year-old Eileen calls up her childhood friend, Simon, and their conversation devolves into phone sex.
She rolled over onto her back, looking up at the faint pin-prick pattern of mould on the ceiling.
It’s not good for your health, working so late, she said. Where are you, in your hotel room?
Right, he replied. Sitting on the bed.
At this point, Rooney has already set up the crackling will-they-won’t-they question; this is the author who gave us Connell and Marianne in Normal People, after all, and the resulting Hulu limited series that melted down many a TV screen during quarantine. But even though you see the sexual tension coming from a mile away, it feels strangely shocking to watch Eileen unspool a fantasy about what a fictitious spouse—not Eileen herself, crucially—would do to Simon after a long day at work. (“If your wife was there now, she would take your tie off for you.”)
And when you got home she would have dinner waiting.
He smiled. Do you think I’m that old-fashioned? he asked.
I think you’re a human being. Who doesn’t want to have dinner waiting for them if they’re stuck at work until half eight?
It’s hilariously vanilla, and you can’t tell who the tradwife fantasy is really working for, but the unblushing matter-of-factness that Rooney imbues in this scene left me unable to tell if I should be embarrassed for everyone or just glad I had a tall glass of water nearby. When Eileen adds some finishing psychoanalytical touches to said fictional wife—“I’m just sketching in the background so you’ll understand the sexual dynamic better”—and manages to finally insert herself into the plot, I had to take a pause. Literary phone sex! What a time to have a pulse. I wish I could say that the phone sex is supposed to say something poignant about gender relations or climate change or general late capitalist ennui, but this scene, full of frisson and familiarity, encapsulates what I think the whole point of reading Beautiful World should be about: to experience extremely well-written longing.
Three novels in, and it’s still what Rooney does best: ensnare us over and over in the jet-fueled heat between good-looking (and supernaturally articulate) Irish youths. You don’t even mind seeing what are essentially the same characters again: Eileen is pretty much Normal People’s Marianne: an intelligent but stunted woman whose relationship to her indifferent family leaves her unable to confront Simon’s obvious love head on. Alice, her best friend, is a redux of the more self-possessed but also writerly Bobbi from Conversations With Friends. Felix’s queer identity, also like Bobbi, seems to grant him the gift of omniscience; Simon straddles both the sophisticated older man (Nick) and boy-next-door (Connell) archetypes, a classic Rooneyian heartthrob who has his life together and communicates his feelings in unblinking sentences. (Everyone in the Rooneyverse, continues to appear annoyingly communicative, whether they’re writing long letters about the Bronze Age or apologizing for leaving porn open on their iPhone browser.).
Beautiful World is certainly Rooney’s most explicit book. While Conversations With Friends was conceptually the juiciest of the bunch, the actual sex is barely colored in. What’s hot is that slow road to seduction: Nick resting an ice-cold beer against France’s bare collarbone; Frances staring at the breadth of his hand. You could be forgiven for thinking Normal People, the book, was downright clinical compared to Normal People, the Hulu softcore, though the chemistry of Connell and Marianne circling each other on paper, all soft necks and clasped wrists, offers plenty to screenshot to the group chat. What I like most about Rooney’s writing is how each sentence builds like a brushstroke: on its own, any particular line can seem pedestrian. Assembled together, we get whole scenes of otherwise banal parties and bus rides, glances cast and bodies rearranged, all rendered to a storybook-like effect.
When it comes to the actual sex in Beautiful World, both of the phoned variety and otherwise, Rooney’s terseness works even better. Hands float slowly up the waist, shoulders roll luxuriously against bedsheets. The fact of desire is something to be discussed aloud, not kept quiet or reserved for internal monologues. “When we go to our separate beds, I find I think about you a bit,” Felix tells Alice on a trip to Rome. “So I thought I would come in here and see if you were thinking about me as well. Okay?” And maybe that’s what really does it: the earnest admissions of want. Postvaccine society promised us the return of one-night stands and endless ecstasies of spontaneous connection; what if what we really want is to stay up late reading about 30-somethings specifying what they’re really looking for?
Moreover, this time, Rooney leaves the Marxist statements and explorations on ethical slutdom at home. The beautiful world painted in this third novel is simply one where we fight and fuck and forgive each other not only while the apocalypse rages on, but perhaps more urgently because of it. (“Oh Simon, you’re so important-looking, I’m afraid you’re going to be assassinated” being Eileen’s first line of dialogue, rendering all other pickup lines inferior.)
“When we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead,” Eileen writes to Alice midway through the book. “It’s the very reason I root for us to survive—because we are so stupid about each other.”
A hopeful, if somewhat resigned sigh of a revelation from one supposed voice of my generation. After finishing Beautiful World in a greedy final gulp, I found myself checking the news and then glancing out the window. The sky in New York was still hazy with smoke. And I thought, you know what? I’ll have what she’s having.
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